“What are you thinking?” he asked just above a whisper.
She shook her head. “Nothing.” He didn’t want to know. Hell, she didn’t want to know. Somehow, she was falling in love with him all over again. She could feel it happening with every touch of his mouth and beat of her heart. Sometime between the night they’d kissed in the girls’ bathroom and today, her feelings had grown and gotten stronger.
“Then why are you frowning?”
She hadn’t realized she’d been frowning until he mentioned it. She forced a smile. “Because I’m going to miss you when I leave,” she said, which was true, but hadn’t been what she’d been thinking.
“That’s not for a while yet. Who knows. Maybe by then, you won’t want to go.”
She waited for him to say more. To say that he wanted her to stay in Cedar Creek. Stay and be with him, but he didn’t. Instead, he softly bit the ball of her foot. She should get out of the tub. Get as far away from him as possible before she fell in love with him completely.
That would have been the smart thing, but she reached for his hand, and he dropped her foot. He pulled her toward him as he reached for the condom on the side of the tub. He stood, and she took the black square package from his hands. She knelt before him as rose-scented bubbles swirled about her breasts and jets of hot water tickled her thighs. She wrapped her free hand around the long ridged length of his erection and looked up into his face. His lids were lowered over his hot brown eyes, and she parted her lips and took him into her mouth.
He groaned deep in his chest and pushed her hair back from her face. She slid her hand up and down his hard shaft and pressed her tongue into the corded vein just beneath the plump head. “That feels good,” he said just above a whisper, watching her from eyes glazed over with lust. She worked him over with her mouth and his fingers tangled in her hair. He didn’t push or shove the back of her head, as some men tended to do. Just held her hair and watched as she had her way with him. He told her how much he loved what she did to him, then he tilted his head back and came in her mouth.
When it was over, he wrapped his hands around the tops of her arms and pulled her to her feet. “Thank you,” he said, and pulled her tight against his chest. “I remember the first time you did that for me.” He ran his fingers up and down her spine, then grasped her bottom in both of his hands.
“I remember.” She reached between their bodies and wrapped her hand around his penis. It wasn’t as hard as it had been moments ago, and she stroked it until it was stiff. “And I remember how fast you could get it up again. You still can.” She rolled the condom down his shaft and pushed his shoulders until he sat submerged in bubbles halfway up the defined muscles of his chest. She straddled his hips, placed her palms on the sides of his face, and kissed him. The tips of her breasts brushed his warm skin, and she ran her fingers through his hair. She kissed his neck and his throat, and her hands ran all over him, touching as much of him as she could reach. It wasn’t just sex now. There was more involved than just body parts, and when she took him deep into her body, her hands returned to the sides of his face and she stared into his eyes. His labored breath brushed her cheek as she moved and rocked her hips.
“Zach,” she whispered, her voice heavy with desire and emotion. Within minutes an orgasm rushed across her skin and gripped her heart. Her vaginal walls tightened around him, and his fingers dug into her behind. As he came into her body, she kissed his mouth, filling the kiss with the new and conflicted feelings she felt in her heart.
When it was over, he pushed her hair from her cheek. His gaze searched her face as if he were looking for something. “I didn’t think sex could get better than it was last week. I was wrong.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed the side of his head. What was she going to do now? Now that she was falling headfirst in love with him—again.
He softly bit her shoulder. “The next few weeks are going to be hectic,” he said against her skin. “With the girls out of school until after New Year’s, but I want to see you. I want to be with you all I can before your sister has her baby and you move back to Idaho.” He kissed the crook of her neck. “I’m going to miss being with you.”
There was a lot she could have said. Like she was going to miss being with him too, but she didn’t. Her feelings for him were too painfully new. Or perhaps they were old hidden feelings from the past just waiting to be reignited. She was scared and confused and didn’t know what to do. “Are you hungry?”
“Starvin’,” he said as he pulled back to look into her face. “Got any more of those waffles from the toaster?”
“Eggos?”
“Yeah. I love those.”
She smiled and shook her head. He didn’t love her, but he loved her Eggos.
After Zach left, Adele got busy writing her new series. She filled her head with characters from different galaxies and an outlandish plot. She didn’t want to think about falling in love with Zach. She didn’t want to dissect it and analyze it and pick it apart. It was much easier to calculate space travel and invent new life- forms.
At five thirty, she left to pick up Kendra from the middle school. The moment she pulled behind the buses that had taken the dance team to San Angelo, she knew there was something wrong. Her niece stood by herself, her eyes red and her backpack slung over one shoulder.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, as Kendra got into the car.
“Nothing.”
“Where’s Tiffany? Doesn’t she need a ride home?”
“She rode with Lauren Marshall.”
“Isn’t her stepmomma Genevieve Brooks?”
“Uh-huh.” Adele was fairly certain Tiffany didn’t like Genevieve.
“Why?” She pulled out into traffic and headed toward the hospital. “We could have taken her home.”
“She doesn’t want a ride from us anymore.”
Adele glanced at her niece. “Did you two have a fight?”
Kendra shook her head, and her dark ponytail brushed the shoulders of her coat. “She saw you kiss her daddy after the game.”
“Oh.” She returned her eyes to the road. Shit. “So now she hates me.”
“She says you are like all the rest. That you only acted like you liked her to get to her dad.”
“That’s bullshit.” They stopped at a red light, and Adele pushed her hair behind one ear. “Do you believe her?”
Kendra shrugged. “Not really…but…”
“But what?”
“She says I can’t come to her house and practice the dance routines anymore. And if I don’t practice between now and Friday, we could lose the competition against Pampas.” Tears welled up in Kendra’s eyes. “If she doesn’t like me, the other girls won’t like me either.”
“The other girls will still like you.”
“No, they won’t.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Not if she doesn’t.”
Adele thought back to the hell of junior high and cringed.
“I wish I’d never moved here,” Kendra cried. “I miss my old school and my old friends.”
“Can you get one of the other girls to come to your house and practice the routines with you?”
“Maybe.”
“Why don’t you ask, and tomorrow night we’ll move all the furniture out of the living room. You can practice in there.”
“I’ll ask.”
But when Adele drove to the school to pick up Kendra from practice the next day, she was once again by herself. She’d suffered another day of Tiffany’s cold shoulder and felt more alone than ever. By that Friday, when things had not gotten any better, Adele mentioned it to Zach while they put together Harris’s Swing ’N Bounce. Both girls were at the local mall with the rest of the team, selling cookies to raise money for a big trip they had coming up.
“Has Tiffany mentioned anything to you about seeing you kiss me after the State Championship game?”
He looked up from the instructions in his hands. “No. I don’t think she saw it.”
“Yes. She did.”
“She didn’t mention it to me.” He set down the instructions and picked up a metal leg. “Has she said something
